VideoRetailer.org - Exploring the Intersection of Video and e-Commerce.

Video Email Best Practices

Video Email Marketing in 2009: Facts, Stats, Limitations, Possibilities from Justin Foster on Vimeo.

Here embedded an excellent presentation on video email by Justin Foster and Lisa Harmon. Topics covered include:

- Concerns, attitudes, and expertise level of marketers seeking to learn more about video in email marketing
- Forces driving video in email
- Methods for achieving video in email
- Video .GIF vs. Animated .GIF
- CertifiedVideo (from Goodmail Systems)
- Video .GIF pros and cons
- List of which mail clients support video, by video inclusion method
- Email client market share
- Browser market share & video .GIF limitations based on browser
- Which email clients block images by default
- Several examples of email messages that include video
- Video .GIF best practices
- Example results
- Common questions re: video in email

Content creation for video marketing - think different!

This is the first post of a series about what video marketing really is, which we started at VideoRetailer last Friday. So this is chapter (1) and I will analyze basic aspects about the nature of online marketing video content.

Many potential clients, at least in Spain where I am writing from, still believe that creating video contents for their online marketing mix is expensive, or too expensive for them. They imagine a film crew of 20 shooting a high production value 30 seconds’ commercial that costs a fortune and creates negative ROI (= high cost, low real impact, difficult to measure). It will take us some more time to “educate” the market about what video marketing really is. Maybe this year’s tighter budgets will trigger the learning curve, although I see video marketing more as a new opportunity for SME rather than a online substitute for offline advertising of the big brands.

However, I think there are a couple of things we should be able to transmit to our clients and especially to their intermediaries, their online agencies. First, forget TV commercials and its costly production processes. Video marketing is simpler and cheaper and if it’s well executed, it’s more effective but above all: measurable. Second, think differently about the contents. TV advertising contents tend to picture a fantasy world that most consumers cannot relate to and more important, they cannot react to the message because it is closed away in a unidirectional TV set.

So, what are some of the basic rules designing and producing online video contents regardless of the nature of your business or your sector?

1) Be specific and segment your audience. On the web 2.0, most people still look for answers (only a fraction really contributes). So, make sure your clips resolve the doubts or questions of the users, especially for products and services with a complicated presale phase. There are many good examples around, let me just mention 2 examples. TV Trip and Caja Navarra, a Spanish Savings Bank. TV Trip is a video based hotel guide and booking site where all listed hotels come with their respective clip, allowing to check out the rooms and the location around. The videos have a rather low production value and are not too original but they are of great complementary value because they help to choose the right place for your stay. I love the mash-up with the Google map below. It makes online booking really easy. Caja Navarra has a female video guide on the home page and on interior sites, she pilots you through the different services the bank offers. Simple and nicely executed and of great help to first time bank users or online clients.

2) Adapt the content to the medium. Or said differently, make your content really easy to watch and share. Divide the contents logically and make sure you show the right clip at the right moment. There is nothing more annoying than having to watch a 5 minute video when the useful information shows up in the last 15 seconds. Offer streaming and download versions in easy-to-control players and without any doubt it’s worth thinking about all those who connect to the web via iPhones, Blackberries or other video-enabled phones.  Then, make sure that important text information or subtitles come in legible sizes.

3) Use real people and a documental style. Whenever it’s possible we try to shoot with people who are somehow related to the company or organization. If you are a furniture manufacturer, let your designers speak about their creations. If you are a retailer, bring your satisfied customers in front of the camera.  Another possibility is to find a passionate amateur who love to talk about gardening, recycling, cooking, cars, shoes, travelling, whatever… you name it. Don’t search for complicated locations, involves your camera-loving employees, clients, providers or fans and let them send the message about your product, service or brand.

4) Think big and produce small. Make sure you don’t run out of contents too soon because it won’t be cost efficient to shoot one clip every once in a while. Think ahead about the contents you need and invest time into preproduction to make the actual shooting as easy and smooth as possible. To my experience, you might need between 2 to 6 people in these kind of production processes depending on the briefing, of course. That can include script writer, camera man, photography and/or lighting technician, cutter and maybe a graphic effect designer. Depending on project’s requirement and scope sometimes even 2 people - camera man and cutter - can do the job.

Video Commerce Chronicles Episode 5: Peter Cobb Video Commerce full presentation at eTail West ‘09

eBags Video Program presentation by Peter Cobb, Co-Founder and SVP. Peter covers a broad range of topics during this 30 minute presentation at eTail West ‘09. Enjoy the video and the slides right below.

Full Video

Slides transcript

1. Peter Cobb February 2009 Co-founder and SVP of Marketing, eBags

2. The eBags Video Program
* Started March 2007
* One full-time video producer
* 210 videos
* 85% self produced, 15% from suppliers
* Partnered with Silicon Valley startup Liveclicker for technological aspects

3. Video Everywhere

4. Benefits of Video
* Increased onsite conversions
* Higher customer satisfaction
* SEO
* Presence on social networks
* Enhance marketing programs (email, affiliates)
* Low-cost way to grab technological edge
* Brands love it

5. Conversion Lift on product pages Group A – No Video Group B – With Video # Product pages 25,000 25,000 served Conversion rate 6.63% 10.00% (did not view video) Conversion rate 6.63% 15.84% (viewed video) Conversion rate 50.1% increase N/A (did not view video) Conversion rate N/A 138.9% increase (viewed video)

6. SEO/Customer Satisfaction
* Prominent SEO placement
* Liquidated inventory of key product
* Boosted conversion rates

7. Presence on social networks
* Facebook
* Twitter
* MySpace
* Digg
* StumbleUpon
* YouTube
* Blogs
* Google Video
* Etc.

8. Number of video plays
* 100,603 video plays (since May 5 2008)
* Average 260/day, accelerating to 780/day
* Distribution across all channels: onsite, SEO, affiliate, email, social networks.

9. Video Center on eBags
* Since July 24th 2008 81,423 unique visitors 111,325 page views

10. Video on Brand pages
* Since Sep 17th 2008 1,138,517 banner impressions 5,543 video views

11. Video on product pages
Since Jan 16th 2008 102,998 banner impressions 3,699 video views

12. Video on YouTube
Tracked since October 12th 2008 9,337 unique visitors

13. With affiliates
Since Mid November 2008 w/Liveclicker 15,775 views, increasing • Commission Junction • LinkShare

14. Affiliate product review example
* Article eBags Video + Merchandising

15. Content analysis
* Demos and testimonial most “engaging” (people viewing at least 10-seconds)
* Promotion/Interview show lower engagement

16. Engagement detail
* Product demos are most engaging. These videos also show most views on Youtube

17. Affiliates: branding videos best
* Notice the low level of engagement on affiliate site

18. A few examples (1)
* What people will like more art than science…

19. A few examples (2)

20. What we’re working on
* Next-generation player with integrated merchandising
* Social Media development
* Email integration

21. Key Take Aways
* Getting Started
* Video Production Doesn’t Have To Be Complex
* “Video Everywhere” is the correct strategy
* Making it a process
* Find the right balance of content
* Work with suppliers to acquire video assets Solving the technical limitations
* Partner with the right company and get going

22. Thank you

Video Commerce Chronicles Episode 4: Optimizing Video on an e-Commerce site

Excellent panel discussion at eTail - Optimizing Video on an e-Commerce site, with the following people:

• McKay Thomas from Billardex
• Peter Cobb from eBags
• Jimmy Healey from Onlineshoes.com
• Ty Ricker from Riv Works

Video Commerce eTail West ‘09: Candid Thoughts

eTail was a nice conference last week in Phoenix, AZ. I spent two days there, talking to retailers and partners about the video commerce industry, among other things. Couple of candid observations -

1. The video commerce sessions were (a) on the last day of the event, (b) overlapping which each other (the David Widzig ShopNBC session, and the panel of video commerce experts with McKay Thomas, Peter Cobb and Jimmy Healey), YET packed with retailers.

2. Video commerce is HOT. Everybody has plans to go video in the next 18-months. Even the businesses that are hunkering down in this economy recognize the need to “go video”

3. Had a great time networking with other video experts at the VCC networking event. Met with Vendaria and a few others players in the industry.

4. Heard numerous stories of video commerce associated with social media marketing, which gets me really excited at a personal level. Possibilities are infinite, and we’re just scratching the surface of what can be done when these two are intelligently combined.

Amazon.com’s Video Commerce Widget for Affiliates

With its Video Commerce widget, Amazon leverages the power of video, but this time, outside of its site boundaries. Once again, the Seattle-based eRetailer is showing its leadership in the adoption of new technology, surfing two separate trends: video and social media.

Hello and thank you for your interest in Amazon.com’s new video widget. This is a new and exciting way to generate revenue by adding product links to the videos you already post to your web site or blog. Simply upload your video to Amazon and add the products you would like to showcase. When you’re finished adding products, you receive a small snippet of HTML that you can use to embed your video onto your web page. When people make a purchase through the product links in your video, you’ll earn money through your Amazon’s associates account. It’s that easy. [...]

The resulting widget looks terrific. As the videos are playing, links to the product pages with pricing and rating information pop-up, making it very easy for users to access the product they’re viewing and adding it to the shopping cart.

The text/link overlay approach isn’t new: there are a handful of companies already doing this type of overlay technology for retail sites. But what’s really interesting about this approach is the combination of video and social media:

1) Pushing the envelope on the video commerce side… prior to this new feature, Amazon was already heavily pushing video content onto many of its top categories, whether it’s for the Amazon Kindle, the Wii (see below) or video games. But up until now, the products weren’t featured in the video itself, and the user had to look around to actually click on the product of interest.

2) … Delivering the tools affiliates need… While Linkshare (Flexlinks) and Commission Junction (SmartLinks) offer some options for pushing video to affiliates, these are very limited and require a lot of work on the part of the merchant, which limits the number of merchants which actually offer video content.

3) With a unique community twist! This is my favorite part - and the smartest of all. Rather than providing stock content to the affiliates, which would be perceived as regular video ads, the publisher creates it own content and uploads it to Amazon for the Video Widget. There are many advantages to this approach: first, publishers with existing content (take for example video game reviews) can now directly monetize video content with Amazon in the player, instead of having to place links around the video player like before. Second, it opens up a world of content creating possibilities for the publishers who get a chance to produce unique and differentiated content.

Who said ‘09 was going to be boring!

Below - the Wii product page on Amazon.com, with video taking a large portion of the page. 

One more reason to publish your commerce videos to YouTube: Insight

YouTube has recently launched an improved analytics interface which will give you basic yet insightful demographics information about your video content.

While the critics will say that YouTube isn’t a viable video commerce platform for serving video content on a respectable eCommerce site, publishing your video content is essential to reaching out to a new audience and establishing a presence on one of the most trafficked Web sites on the Internet today. With YouTube’s Insight, marketers have one more reason to push their video content to YouTube, in addition to what they might be doing with an entreprise-class video management platform.

I finally got a chance to sit down and take a look at what Insight has to offer. To set the right expectation, please remember that YouTube is a B2C video platform and we therefore shouldn’t expect Omniture, Coremetrics or Fireclick type of Analytics. With that in mind, I was impressed with the dataset from YouTube, primarily because the types of data available simply cannot be found anywhere else.

The interface itself is very simple, divided in four main tabs: dashboard, views, popularity and demographics. Most of the useful information is available from the dashboard view, which is shown here above. There, you can find a simple views report, top level as well as detailed for each video, with a nice calendar function to explore different time ranges.

Clearly, the value is in the demographics data. To the best of my knowledge, no Web analytics company can provide this type of metrics, and for a good reason. Google is exposing their internal demographics data from Adwords/Adsense, thereby giving invaluable information for free to YouTube users. By pushing your commerce videos to YouTube, you can get a solid idea for what videos are most popular by age segment and geographical location.

I spent over 30 mins slicing and dicing YouTube data for a top retail site which graciously opened up the interface for me. I was like a 5 year-old in a candy store trying to understand why video XYZ was getting double, triple, tenfold the traffic of the average clip. While I can’t share any of the details here, I’ll comment on two points that clearly came out.

1. Celebrities tend to attract a lot of eye balls. Brands too, if and when the brand has already some market awareness. Make sure you include these keywords when uploading to YouTube, rather than the more descriptive “Running Shoes”, “DVD players” or “Fall fashion preview”.

2. Average viewership on YouTube appear to be fairly low (with the exception of #1 above). I would even say minuscule in some cases, compared to video on the actual ecommerce site. This confirms my earlier belief that YouTube should be part of your video commerce strategy, but not your video commerce strategy.

Overall, I highly recommend pushing existing videos onto YouTube. For the few eyeballs, for the thrill of going viral (sometimes), and… for the data.

Related: Read Glenn Gabe’s take on YouTube Insight on the Internet Marketing Driver Blog.

ShopNBC’s Video Commerce Endeavor Is Inspiring

When Justin Foster from the Video Commerce Consortium talked about ShopNBC’s video commerce experiments at Streaming Media West last fall, many of us were impressed by the vision and commitment from a company that’s been competing for years against the Home Shopping Network and QVC, but somewhat trailing behind. True, HSN and QVC still retain the lead in terms for marketshare and brand awareness, but ShopNBC.tv has taken a clear lead in the nascent video commerce space with a site that’s designed as an entirely new channel.

It’s not hard to find ShopNBC.tv. Personally, I’m seeing the ads popping all over the place on the internet, like this prominent and wide banner on WebWorkerDaily, one of my favorite blogs.

The site itself has been carefully built as a new destination site, using Flash as the presentation layer. After landing on it, you are immediately taken into the video experience, since it’s streaming the TV content live, without needing to install or activate anything. Yes my friends, the homepage is boldly featuring live video content, which is sort of a powerful statement: this is video, this is ShopNBC.tv.

The navigation on the site is innovative too. Unlike many ecommerce destinations nowadays, which feature countless links to site sections, departments, brands, etc, ShopNBC.tv is betting on a simplified shopping experience with simple yet intuitive rollover menus that allow you to shop by category, brand or host. The search is also elegantly designed and consistent with other elements on this page. Also impressive the fact that the video never stops playing, all navigational content is overlayed right on the page without any interruption.

Interesting also what happens when the user is ready to buy a product - as the click button is redirecting the user to the ultra-elaborate ShopNBC.com, and the most seamless fashion.

On the critical side, the biggest concern would be the extensive use of Flash, which limits SEO visibility and linking (everything happens under the same URL). Another limitation, which I am sure will be overcome soon, is the lack of social media features which would enable sharing across blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.Nevertheless, what an amazing shopping experience. ShopNBC.tv will no doubt be the benchmark for many video retailers moving forward:

1. ShopNBC.tv was designed as a new destination site, with its own identity and user experience.

2. ShopNBC.tv is a true video shopping site. Video is the center of the shopping experience, and ShopNBC.tv doesn’t make any excuses about it.

3. ShopNBC.tv is the innovator to follow. We are not aware of any similar project in the industry that marries video and commerce so well.

How is Amazon Selling you the Kindle? (Hint: starts with a “V”)

Like Apple, Amazon is aggressively spreading video across its product pages to pump up conversions and educate its users for its top selling product: the Kindle. eRetailers take note.

Even in this economy, the Kindle is going to be the hot Christmas gift for many Americans this year. It’s been predicted that Amazon will sell over a million Kindles before 2009, making this new toy one of the most successful new electronics product launches since the iPod. A billion dollar opportunity, according to some.

Make no mistake about it - the Kindle is a big opportunity for Amazon.com and naturally, the web experience team must have invested countless dollars on the product page to make sure it converts. And — oh what a surprise — a video of the Kindle is taking a prominent location on the product detail page.

This is a major shift from traditional product detail pages, where traditionally, the left side of the product page is occupied by static images, and sometimes a 3D view of the product. Confident that the video is more persuasive, Amazon chose to replace the classic images and feature the video instead, a bold move I’m sure has been validated with rigorous A/B testing.

There is a lot more - I was particularly impressed with these features which I think are terribly missing from many video retailers that I come across: - The ability to share the video - The subtle use of music in the video - The clever use of captioning to stress key selling points - A clear call the action at the end, with an HTTP link - User review scores and other important link right underneath the video in support of the purchasing decisionI get a sense that this type of product presentation will be copied over and over again in the next few years. After all, Amazon.com has pioneered important eCommerce innovations in the past and seems to always be one step ahead of the competition.This is exciting, to say the least.

Full video: Video Commerce - Selling online with Video at Streaming Media West

StreamingMedia.com just published the entire Streaming Media West 2008 conference content, including the session on Video Commerce, with participants from the Video Commerce Consortium, drugstore.com and eBags.com.

After the conference I also conducted a number of interviews that will be available on VideoRetailer.org shortly.